It’s been one year since Google started their Google Apps Education Edition and nine months since we started this services in Schools and a lot had changed in that time. Thousands of educational institutions now use Google Apps, and have hundreds of thousands of active users.

Among the key new features and upgrades in the past few months are: :

– Increased inbox storage
– Shared documents and presentation features
– Customizable start pages
– Shared address book
– Web-based multi-user chat
– IMAP for Gmail

In the recent Google@School event, the following video were posted.



According to reports on Zdnet’s Googling Google, Google decided to update their storage counter algorithm to significantly increase its speed. On October 12th 2007, the storage counter found itself at 3GB, at the time of this post, it had reached 4.3GB, and in 30 years you can expect it to be at 42GB. If you want to get technical, by January 2nd 3456, it will be 2.70266701 × 10⁷²TB according to Googlified.

To give you an idea of how much faster this new algorithm is, in just 10 days you can expect to see over 4GB, and in January 2008 it will be up to 6. Here is the code that makes the counter tick:

var CP = [
[ 1175414400000, 2835 ],
[ 1192176000000, 2912 ],
[ 1193122800000, 4321 ],
[ 1199433600000, 6283 ],
[ 2147328000000, 43008 ],
[ 46893711600000, Number.MAX_VALUE ]
];

The new version of Gmail is still missing in action, but this new information may put to rest any speculation that Google will give us unlimited storage to keep up with Yahoo any time soon.

Google has started using the counter found on your personal Gmail account for Google Apps too. Right now, basic users have 3.5GB of storage at their disposal (until now it was stuck at 2GB), and it will noticeably grow as the Gmail counter is moving a lot faster these days.

Google unveiled Google Docs mobile this morning. It’s a smaller, lightweight version of Google Docs and Spreadsheets, which lets you browse any stored documents, spreadsheets, or presentations on your mobile phone.

Read…

Google posted a message on the Google Calendar discussion group that drops a hint that all the engineers on Google Calendar are working hard to get task lists into the service. This has been one of the most requested features since the service launched (and even before) — which makes it surprising that it’s still MIA.

Hey everyone – thanks for the loud and very clear feedback on your desire for a to-do/task list feature. We’re pretty passionate about to- do lists here as well, and we’ve got something in the works. Of course, we’re working to add our special Google secret sauce to the to- do lists space (which can take some time to get right,) so we don’t have something to announce just yet, but the entire team is listening to these threads closely.

Please be patient – we’ll have more to talk about soon.

This response came yesterday after a month of comments in a user-started “to-do list petition“. What do you think? Is this one of the most important missing features in Google Calendar?

Gmail users running short on storage are getting a reprieve starting today. The company has announced they’ll be increasing the speed in which they’ve been adding storage to their popular e-mail service, along with bumps to Google Apps users.

The storage counter had been running on the normal Gmail’s start page, which is nearing the 3 GB mark bit by bit–and now, it’s doing it just a little bit faster. Meanwhile, Google Apps users are getting a slightly better end of the deal. Standard and Educational users are getting a size match with Gmail’s offerings, 3GB, while the Premier gets an extra 15GB, bringing their cap to 25GB.